Event Description

Combining dance, theater, spoken text, and video, Red is a striking documentary performance that takes its point of departure from the Cultural Revolution’s canonized ballet, The Red Detachment of Women. Red revisits this iconic ballet through memory, movement, and anecdotal material from the dancers. Join us asWen Hui, a pioneer of contemporary dance in China, and her Beijing-basedLiving Dance Studiopremiere this stunning new work in New York.

Wen Hui believes that the body holds memories and, through a complex and arduous process, she and her company extract these memories as movements.

The dramaturg for the production,Zhuang Jiayun, describes Wen Hui’s philosophy:

Our body is an archive, the witness and carrier of history, a location to understand how the assembled histories and memories have inscribed themselves deeply on us. Our body is also a catalyst for memory and sites of transgressive impulses.

The all-female, multi-generational cast of four bring their personal relations to the revolutionary ballet to the fore,Redthen becoming a dynamic container for the exploration of history and ideology. The "grandmother" of the company,Liu Zhuying, danced in the original performances ofThe Red Detachment of Women thousands of times. The younger Wen Hui looked up to Liu, when in the early 1970s, she was a young student at Yunnan Art School dreaming of being cast in the ballet.Li Xinminis a generation younger than Wen and comes toRedfrom her unorthodox journey, from a rural mountainous town to becoming the housekeeper of theLiving Dance Studioand then an unlikely segue to joining the dance company.Li Yuyaois the youngest in the cast, and at age 26 did not live through the Cultural Revolution, but resonates with the similarities between the main character and her own story, both coming from a rural village.

Join us for a pre-performance lecture by Zhuang Jiayun, a scholar of Chinese performance, on Thursday, November 15 and Friday, November 16 from 6:30–7 pm and a special pre-performance panel discussion that explores the history and influence of the Cultural Revolution on Saturday, November 17 from 4–6:30 pm. Each performance is followed by a Q & A session with the artists.